Schools work to snuff out student smoking

Whether in the parking lot, on a trip to the bathroom during class, or throughout lunchtime, students are smoking on Broward County high school campuses.

"Students are caught smoking, on average, once a week," Stoneman Douglas High assistant principal Ty Thompson said in an email interview.

"Between 25 and 30 incidents occur during the school year," he said.

While smoking is a problem, it isn't setting off alarms.

"There are smoke detectors in the bathrooms, but they will not go off for cigarette smoke. They are more for fires and safety reasons," Thompson said. "There are multiple cameras around campus, but not in the restrooms. We have security personnel constantly patrolling the restrooms for smoking."

Coral Glades High Principal Michael Ramirez said the situation is the same at his school: While Glades has alarms in the bathrooms, he cannot rely on them to alert anyone to smoking because they do not pick up cigarette smoke.

"Students are very proactive, and if they see things they will communicate to a teacher. Then the teacher notifies security, and security would go on with that," Ramirez said.

About one or two students are caught each month at Coral Glades, but the number varies, he said.

At Stoneman Douglas, "I actually don't see a lot of kids smoking at school, but I hear they do," junior Amanda Corin said.

"Security is pretty tight, but it could be more secure. There should be more people patrolling the hallways, making sure the students aren't doing anything bad," she said.

Thompson said Douglas' security team is constantly moving around, checking to see where kids are during classes and where they should be. Students go to different locations each time they smoke, so it's hard to catch all of them, he said.

J.P. Taravella High Principal Shawn Cerra said his school has smoke detectors in the bathrooms, but it also has cameras.

If anyone sees a student going into the bathroom for an abnormally long time, that gives them a hint that they are doing something they shouldn't be doing, he said.

An Everglades High administrator said the number of students caught smoking at his school varies.

"It could be one, it could be 10, but there's no consistent number. Sometimes we catch them, sometimes we don't," Everglades High assistant principal Anthony Smith said. "We remind students of what the Code of Conduct says – that smoking is illegal in school."

He said the punishment for smoking "is usually a 10-day suspension, but agreement with the drug-abuse program reduces it to three days," he said.

At Taravella, "in order to prevent smoking in school, we're just trying to increase security and raise awareness," Cerra said.

Schools face a big hurdle.

"There's no way to prevent it. Kids who smoke will find ways to do it in school no matter what," J.P. Taravella High junior Ashley Friedman said.

But, Thompson said, although some students choose to smoke, security and administration are constantly on patrol to get a whiff of what students are doing. Their goal: Eliminate the student smoking trend.